As people raises increasingly-higher requirements for a terminal device such as a mobile phone or a set-top box, a manner in which a terminal device manages a task has gradually changed from single-task running to a multi-task manner, and a system allows multiple tasks to simultaneously work, so that a user's requirements such as surfing the Internet, listening to music, and chatting may be simultaneously met. When the user switches between multiple tasks, icons of tasks used recently may be displayed through a certain operation. Then an icon of a task to which the user wants to switch is selected to switch to the new task.
In the prior art, a conventional multi-task interface of a mobile phone, a set-top box, or the like, presents icons of tasks that a user has run in a latest period of time or an icon of a currently running task. Information that may be conveyed to the user by using this manner is relatively little, because an icon is only a representation of a task and an interface when a task is running cannot be seen when only the icon of the task is displayed. Particularly, as nowadays various types of terminal applications are increasingly abundant, a user installs or uninstalls a new application at an increasingly-higher frequency. For some newly installed applications, more often a user is not familiar with an icon, feels very strange when seeing the icon, and does not understand which task the icon represents.
In addition, an icon on a multi-task interface of a terminal such as an existing mobile phone or a set-top box is often static and an interface when a task is running cannot be displayed. Taking a video playing task as an example, on a conventional multi-task interface, a user can see only an icon of a task instead of abbreviated information about content currently being played. In addition, the size of an icon on a multi-task interface is fixed and cannot be changed to a different size along with a change in the number of tasks, and therefore cannot either express some different information as the type of the task changes.